We've noticed an uptick in recognition--or at least public acknowledgement--of the negative feedback effects at work in a credit-dependent economy slogging through a period of credit contraction.
First, from Edward Hadas of breakingviews.com, in yesterday's Wall Street Journal:
The specter of deleveraging still haunts the financial markets. Rightly so, for the removal of credit from the global economy is a process that feeds on itself. That means that the credit crunch could easily turn into something much nastier.
Before the deleveraging came the leveraging. Take the U.S. The ratio of all sorts of debt to gross domestic product rose to 342% at the end of September 2007 from 160% in 1975. Through 2000, debt increased by 2.4 percentage points a year faster than GDP. But after the turn of the millennium, the rate accelerated almost to 3.7 percentage points a year.
While it was happening, only a few sourpusses complained. Increasing debt was seen as a natural trend. As economies get richer, they have more need for debt-financed investments and inventories. But lending grew much faster after 2000 than even the most gifted apologist could explain away. It was a bubble, which has now been popped.
In a credit bubble, one thing leads to another. You can bid more for a house because banks are willing to lend more. So house prices rise, giving the banks more confidence about lending yet more. So you build an addition or buy a new car.
Multiply that by a few hundred million borrowers and presto, asset prices go up and economic growth is high. Banks rejoiced. They set up off-balance-sheet vehicles that piled on debt. Leveraged-buyout groups borrowed to take companies private; hedge funds borrowed to invest in assets. And so on.
In deleveraging, too, one thing leads to another. Start with a bank that has lost a few billion dollars on subprime mortgages. The bosses are likely to decide that troubled times call for higher capital ratios. That means calling in lines of credit. Some borrowers are forced to sell assets, pulling down prices. The banks then look at the value of their collateral and think: "Oh my god, it's not worth what we thought." They then cut their credit again -- giving another turn of the deleveraging screw.
The housing market was just the start. A series of debt mountains -- credit cards, car loans, LBO loans -- risk being leveled. The credit contraction strikes down financial arrangements that once looked solid -- from structured investment vehicles to auction-rate securities.
If the original debt helped fuel consumption, deleveraging will feed into lower economic activity. If the original debt fueled asset purchases, the consequence will be lower asset prices. There could be a dual effect because lower asset prices can make people feel poorer and less willing to spend money. This is especially the case with people's homes.
How far can this go? Historical parallels aren't terribly comforting. In Japan, a boom in the 1980s was followed by a painful deleveraging. Despite massive government borrowing and five years of a near-zero interest rate on overnight borrowing, the prices of shares and real estate declined by 40% to 70%. The U.K. did better in its deleveraging after 1990 -- house prices dropped by 40%, after taking inflation into account, but share prices rose.
Politicians and central bankers are alarmed by the rapid shift to deleveraging. There are limits to what they can do. Sharp interest-rate cuts may not be enough to make banks abandon their newfound caution in lending, especially if loan losses are rising. Higher government deficits may not help either. In a deleveraging world, the government may borrow so much it crowds out private borrowers seeking funds.
The deleveraging snowball will eventually reach the bottom of the mountain. Banks will start to see opportunities, and borrowers will become more courageous. But it could be a long and painful wait.
Next, from Christian Weller at Credit Slips:
We are headed for the Great Deflation – a period spanning a decade or more of very slow growth, rising unemployment, flat or falling real wages, fewer employer-provided benefits and increasing pressures on government finances.
People borrowed money because they had to. Income growth simply did not keep pace with prices in housing, health care, transportation, energy and food. Much of the debt that families borrowed to finance their consumption came from overseas, which contributed to record high trade deficits. And, the situation is further exacerbated by the fact that productivity growth, the battery in the Energizer Bunny, seems to be running out of juice, since businesses haven’t invested enough in the face of lower demand for their products.
The chickens are coming home to roost. Families either default or repay their debt. Either way, they consume less and economic growth slows. This slowdown can last for some time, just like the run-up in debt did.
At the same time, the structural weaknesses will exacerbate the long-term outlook. Specifically, businesses will have no incentive to invest more if their customers are paying back debt instead of going shopping, thus contributing to less productivity growth. And government revenues will shrink because economic activity is slowing, resulting in less spending, including on education, thereby contributing to the slowdown in innovation. Yet, without faster productivity growth, our competitiveness will suffer and it will be harder to reduce our trade deficit through export growth.
And finally, for now anyway, from Scott Patterson in today's Wall Street Journal:
Economists have a term to describe what it means when things keep going from bad to worse: negative-feedback loop. One day's problems create a broad set of behaviors that only make the problems worse.
Consider housing. As home prices fall, more families see the values of their homes decline to less than the amount of money they have to pay back on their mortgages. That gives them an incentive to walk away from their mortgages and leave their homes empty, which puts more downward pressure on home prices, drawing more households into the loop.
Housing turmoil, in turn, causes consumers to pull back, hurting the broader economy, which puts more downward pressure on home prices. Banks, worried about mortgages going bad, tighten lending standards, shutting some new buyers out of the market and further depressing home prices.
Negative-feedback loops can be pernicious when an economy depends heavily on borrowed money. Total outstanding household debt rose to $13.6 trillion by the third quarter of 2007 from $7.2 trillion at the beginning of 2001 -- a 10% annual growth rate. Mortgage borrowing more than doubled in this stretch. One out of every seven dollars of disposable income earned by Americans now goes toward paying down debt -- near a record.
Corporate borrowing was modest for most of the decade, then started rising at double-digit rates in 2006 and 2007, amid a wave of private-equity buyouts and debt-financed share buybacks. Meantime, Wall Street juices returns by making investments with borrowed money.
Yale economist John Geanakoplos's concept of the leverage cycle shows how negative-feedback loops are driving today's economy. When times are good, credit is ample, causing the economy to heat up. When the cycle shifts, lenders tighten standards and become more demanding about the collateral they hold, feeding into the negative-feedback loops hitting the economy.
He says shifts in this cycle can happen suddenly, catching investors and policy makers off guard. "When the world seems more uncertain, everyone wants a lot of collateral and the economy goes from highly leveraged to no leverage very quickly," he says.
"When things go bad, people have to sell assets to raise collateral," says Gregg Berman, co-head of the risk management unit of RiskMetrics Group. Selling reduces the value of the very assets borrowers have used as collateral against loans -- such as homes. "The more leverage is built into the system, the more the cascade effect is magnified," Mr. Berman says.
Individual banks might be acting rationally when demanding more or better collateral. Trouble is, when every lender does this at once, it becomes self-destructive, triggering shock waves that threaten the banks themselves.
The trick for policy makers is to break the loop. "A macroeconomic downturn tends to diminish the value of many forms of collateral...reinforcing the propagation of the adverse-feedback loop," Federal Reserve Governor Frederic Mishkin said in a January speech. Aggressive Fed interest-rate cuts help by reducing the cost of all of this borrowing.
The psychology of risk aversion behind these negative loops is hard to alter once it sets in. That is why breaking the chain this time could be harder than anyone expected.
We don't see Hy Minsky's name in the press or blogosphere much these days, but his work seems more apt every day.
Sources
Edward Hadas, "Tight Credit Poses Risks," Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2008 (subscription only)
Scott Patterson, "Housing Cycle Is Caught In Vicious Circle," Wall Street Journal, February 20, 2008 (subscription only)
